Transcript: Trump Press Sec Fawning Takes Bizarre Turn as Polls Worsen
Shephard: Yeah. The story of Trump is always that—he does it successfully, and it’s the one thing that he does very well, right?—he campaigns as a guy who says, You see all these other people, I’m different from them. I’m more like you. I understand what your issues are. I’m not in it for myself, or, to the extent that I’m in it for myself, it’s good, right? It’s a different type of corruption. And I think that a lot of people who are understandably fed up with both parties in America look at Trump as something else, right? And I think that, again, Democratic attacks that other Trump is an authoritarian, fascistic force—although they’re accurate, occasionally [they] have the effect of reinforcing that. But in office, the story has always been that he governs, for the most part, with bog standard Republican approach that people hate. He also does a lot of authoritarian and fascist stuff too. But the idea in the press in particular, and you hear it from other Democrats as well, is that somehow he has the magic campaign touch all the time. It’s just not true. And voters reject it.
And again, what you’re seeing here, to point back to the numbers I talked about at the top, is that the voters who were taken in by that argument that he’s different, that he’s going to govern in a different way, have all gone away. It’s why I think the Epstein story is actually significant. It’s a story that shows that Trump is actually like everybody else. He’s in it to protect himself, to protect his own buddies. He’s in it for craven and corrupt personal reasons, because he’s depraved.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And the mention of the authoritarianism and fascism is important, too, because there’s this weird irony around that. It works like this: The authoritarianism and fascism is actually, believe it or not, making him unpopular. People don’t like that stuff. And yet at the same time, those things make it harder for a lot of people to accept that Trump’s unpopular. When the polls come out, when you tweet out a poll showing him tanking, a thousand people just tweet at you, LOL, dictators don’t care about being unpopular. People simply assume it doesn’t matter if he’s unpopular. There’s this tendency to default to this idea that Trump is invincible, right? Either elections will be just canceled or they’ll just be rigged beyond hope. Either way, the central thought is that he has in some sense fundamentally won permanently, right? But there are going to be midterms. I don’t think he’s going to be able to rig them, at least to the degree that he’d like. And people need to start realizing that he wants you to think that he’s invincible so you give up on politics. What do you think, Alex? Am I being too optimistic here?
